Twitter shuts down over Half a million Accounts Promoting Terrorism around the World

San Francisco-based company, Twitter has stepped up their efforts to counter the promotion of terrorism around the world by suspending a huge number of accounts on its platform.

In its latest transparency report, the company announced 376,890 accounts were shut down in the last six months of 2016 and 636,248 accounts have been suspended since the middle of 2015.

The company took these steps following heavy pressure on social networks from governments around the world to use technology tools to lock out individuals promoting religious violence and launching attacks.

Another section of the report wanted social networks to be devoted to removing contents from verified journalists and other media outlets around the world. A total of 88 legal requests were received but did not take any action on the majority with limited exceptions in Germany and Turkey.

For example, we were compelled to withhold tweets sharing graphic imagery following terror attacks in Turkey in response to a court order,” Twitter said.

The social network also announced that the FBI had informed the company it was no longer under a gag order that prevented the disclosure of five cases involving national security letters from the US law enforcement agency in national security cases.

As we continue to push for more transparency in how we can speak about national security requests, we will update this new section in future transparency reports,” Twitter said.

Also, the number of government requests for user data rose 7 percent from the prior six-month period.

Twitter, which is pressured by certain governments to remove hate speech also disclosed for the first time a partnership with a third-party research group called Lumen to catalog any information removed.

Twitter said it began the agreement with Lumen in 2010.

“Unless we are prevented from doing so, when we withhold content in a certain country, Twitter will continue to provide a copy of the request to Lumen so anyone can see what type of content was removed and who made the request,” the company said.